Falling down and getting back up
14-year-old Teaneck documentarian makes video about October 7
Last February, Hillel Kornwasser of Teaneck went to Israel for a family bar mitzvah.
While he was there, the 14-year-old freshman at Heichal HaTorah high school in Teaneck spent some time at Ichilov hospital in Tel Aviv, visiting civilians who had been hurt in the October 7 attack and soldiers who had been injured on that day or in the ensuing war.
“We went into a couple of rooms and we saw people who had experienced literally like the worst day, something that I would never wish on anybody to experience,” Hillel said. “And somehow they found a way to smile, and be positive, and be so welcoming to us.” He found it very inspiring “that despite a huge challenge that they had, they were able to be positive as well.”
Over the course of the trip, Hillel visited the site of the Nova Festival near the Gaza border, he went to Hostage Square in Tel Aviv, and he helped prepare and serve a barbecue on an army base — but he found the time he spent at Ichilov to be the highlight of his trip.
“I walked out of the hospital and everything else kind of took a backseat,” Hillel said. “Everything that I was interested in before, like sports, was suddenly less important.” Hillel had always enjoyed playing sports and he had done some podcasting about sports. “I needed to find a way to let the people in America kind of feel that inspiration that I felt, and for me personally, for it not just to be a spark of inspiration but rather a fire of something that leads to more.”
After the trip, he spoke with some people who had been affected by October 7 and made a few short videos. One focused on Rose Lubin, who grew up in Atlanta, joined the IDF after high school, and served in the border police. Ms. Lubin helped defend Kibbutz Sa’ad, the southern kibbutz where she lived, on October 7. She survived, but a few weeks later she was fatally stabbed in a terror attack while on duty in Jerusalem.
Hillel posted the videos online.
“They got some really nice feedback, which kind of drove me to do more,” he said. About seven months ago, he started working on a documentary about October 7 and its aftermath. The film, “Forces of Resilience,” will premiere on December 22 in Teaneck. (See box.) Jen Airley, one of Hillel’s featured guests in the film, will speak at the premiere.
Hillel partnered with the National Conference of Synagogue Youth — the Orthodox Union’s youth division — on the project. “NCSY’s goal is to ‘keep the flame of Judaism alive’ in Jewish youth,” he said. “Since October 7, with the rise of antisemitism, I feel that Jewish youth need that push to stay strong and resilient.”
Hillel thought of NCSY because he had participated in some of its summer programs, so he reached out to Natan Cohen, the organization’s director of marketing and communications, for help. “Natan has been incredible throughout the whole process,” Hillel said. “He’s really been my go-to guy.”
Working with Mr. Cohen was particularly important because “I made the film while balancing school and the rest of my life,” Hillel added. “So he’s really been a huge help in making this something that has been a dream come true for me.”
Ms. Lubin had been involved in NCSY’s Jewish Student Union program in Atlanta. Mr. Cohen saw Hillel’s short film about her life and heroism and was happy to help with the new project. “I think the message is incredibly important,” he said. “We’re tremendously honored to be partnering with Hillel on this. He’s an incredible teen.”
Mr. Cohen stressed that while he helped with guidance and making connections, “this is really Hillel’s endeavor. “Being able to engage with teens in what’s relevant is really important,” he continued. “One of the ways to engage teens, parents, communities, is really about helping showcase that there are a lot of ways to feel and react when hard things happen, and I think that sense of resilience is really key.
“We’re connected to the story,” Mr. Cohen added. “It is us, meaning it’s our brothers and sisters who are there. And so I think there’s a connection to what’s going on in Israel and therefore a connection to the pain and to the strength in the response to it.”
The documentary contains footage of Hillel speaking with Ms. Airley, whose son Binyamin was killed in November 2023 while he was serving in Gaza; Hillel Fuld, whose brother Ari was fatally stabbed in a terror attack in 2018; Shabbos Kestenbaum, the Harvard Divinity School graduate who has spoken about his experience at Harvard after October 7, and about antisemitism on American university campuses in general; Daniel Sharabi and Amit Musaei, who survived the October 7 attack on the Nova Festival; and Eitan Katz, a popular Jewish singer.
The goal was to choose different people, with different perspectives, so the film can explore “a variety of different ways to be resilient,” Hillel said. “Whether it comes from Shabbos Kestenbaum, who experienced antisemitism on campus, or whether it comes from Daniel or Amit, who were at the Nova Festival when the attack was happening, or whether it comes from the other guests who have experienced tragedy.
“Song has been a major way that people have connected and found comfort,” he added. “Eitan Katz has been a huge inspiration in that area.” Hillel hopes that every viewer can find “at least one person in the film who they can really connect to.”
The film “helps showcase the resilience that I think that we all need to be reminded of,” Mr. Cohen said. “If we can see people like Jen Airley, Daniel Sharabi, and Amit Musaei and see how they have built from what they experienced, then we are able to gain strength from that and relate it back to what’s going on in our lives.
“Sometimes for teenagers, you feel like everything is happening to you personally or every bump feels like a major collision, like the end of the world,” he continued. “To be able to put it in perspective, you may be able to reassess what’s going on in your life.”
Hillel went back to Israel to film some of the segments. There is footage of him talking to Mr. Sharabi and Mr. Musaei at the site of the Nova Festival. “They walked me through their experiences,” he said. “Seeing the area through that lens is something I feel has not been so covered and it was something that I really felt the need to do.”
There is also footage in Sderot and “other communities in the south that have a lot of really impactful stories,” Hillel continued. “We visited the Car Graveyard, a couple of bomb shelters, there were some really heartbreaking places where you went and you saw the bullet holes.” After filming those segments, “I watched videos of the brutal, brutal tragedies that happened in places where I had been standing literally an hour earlier, and I was like, we were literally right there. And I’m watching a video of a terrorist right there, and that really hit me.
“I heard a really nice quote – some people focus on why did it happen and other people focus on what can I do about it.” Hillel chose to focus on the latter. He made the film to share the inspiration he first felt at Ichilov hospital. He hopes the film will enable “people who haven’t necessarily experienced that inspiration, who haven’t necessarily experienced that feeling in Israel or around the stories about October 7,” to meet some of the people he met and to see some of the places he saw through the eyes of Mr. Sharabi and Mr. Musaei.
Hillel spent hundreds of hours editing the footage and the interviews. “Any free time I had has not really been free time because you realize that there are more important things that need to be done,” he said. “Our brothers and sisters in Israel have their fight, the soldiers in Israel are fighting their fight, and I felt that I needed to do my part.”
What does he hope viewers will come away with? “I would quote Joey Newcomb’s beautiful song, ‘You Fall Down You Get Back Up,’ which conveys the true message of resilience,” Hillel said. “The featured guests in the film have fallen down in unimaginable ways, but they got back up, and they’re now much stronger, so I would encourage using that as the viewer’s inspiration.
Hillel is starting to work on “another couple of really cool films,” he said. He’s not sure what he wants to do professionally, but “there’s part of me that really wants to make an impact on the Jewish nation.”
What: Premiere of “Forces of Resilience,” a documentary film by Hillel Kornwasser on the Jewish response to October 7. Jen Airley, mother of fallen soldier Binyamin Airley, who is one of the featured guests in the film, will speak.
When: Sunday, December 22, at 5:30 p.m.
Where: Teaneck location. Address will be disclosed to registered participants.
Register at: ncsy.org/FOR1222
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